Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is heading to Kentucky to campaign for Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in her bid against Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
{mosads}Warren announced the news on Wednesday night on MSNBC, after Senate Republicans defeated her student loan reform bill earlier that day. Warren slammed McConnell as being “there for millionaires and billionaires,” rather than those “working hard, playing by the rules.”
And she said she plans to “fight back” by going to support Grimes.
“One way I’m going to start fighting back is, I’m going to go down to Kentucky, and I’m going to campaign for Alison Lundergan Grimes,” Warren said. “She’s tough; she’s feisty; she endorsed the student loan bill, said she wanted to bring down interest rates for Kentuckians. … So my view is I’m going to get out there and try to make this happen for her.”
Warren heaped praise on Grimes, pegging her as the potential cure to congressional gridlock.
“You get Alison Lundergan Grimes in there, and I feel like she could almost single-handedly get rid of some of the gridlock here in Washington,” Warren said.
Grimes’s campaign enthusiastically embraced Warren and welcomed her interest in the race, as they spent Wednesday hammering McConnell for voting against the loan bill, hitting many of the same themes as Warren.
Though Warren’s known as a prolific fundraiser and a darling of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, her visit to Kentucky might give McConnell another opportunity to tie Grimes to President Obama, who remains deeply unpopular in the state.
A new survey from GOP pollster Magellan Strategies shows Obama holding about steady at 60 percent disapproval. But that survey actually has good news for Grimes — it shows her leading McConnell by three points, with 49 percent support among likely voters to McConnell’s 46 percent support.
McConnell’s team has criticized the survey as oversampling Democrats, but the partisan breakdown of the polling sample actually aligns closely with the state’s registered voter breakdown. Fifty-six percent of respondents were Democrats, while 40 percent were Republicans, just two percent more each than the portion of registered voters of each party in the state.
Indeed, that registration advantage is one reason Democrats believe they have a shot at taking down McConnell this fall. Though Obama and his policies are unpopular in Kentucky, by registration, it’s more of a purple state and currently has a Democratic governor and a Democratic state House.
And the new poll aligns with much of the previous polling, which has shown a similarly tight race with one candidate typically posting a 2-3-point lead.
The automated survey was conducted among 808 likely voters from June 4-5 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.